A slot is a narrow opening or slit, usually in the form of a groove or notch, for receiving something, such as a coin or a letter. It may also refer to a position, as in “a time slot” for a broadcast: “Her TV show was assigned the eight o’clock slot on Thursdays.”
A game machine with spinning reels that pay out credits according to combinations of symbols that appear when the machine is activated. These combinations are determined by the slot machine’s pay table, which varies from machine to machine. Symbols typically correspond to the theme of the machine, and can vary from classics like fruit and bells to stylized lucky sevens. Some machines have additional features, such as wild or scatter symbols, that can substitute for other symbols to create winning lines.
In modern casinos, slot machines are often computerized and accept cash or paper tickets with barcodes that are inserted into slots. The microprocessors inside these machines then read the ticket or cash, activate the reels and stop them when a winning combination is produced. The winnings are then displayed on the machine’s screen. In addition to the traditional slot machines, which have mechanical reels, there are video slots that allow players to insert credit chips to activate a digital display.
Slots in bots are the placeholders that can either wait for content or actively call out for it (active slots). They can be mapped to repository items using built-in or custom slot types, which then trigger scenarios or renderers to deliver the content to the user.
When building a chatbot, it’s important to understand the different types of slots and how they relate to offer management. While a user’s request can contain many slots, only a few are used to create an actual offer in the Service Center. While built-in slot types such as number of rooms, number of nights and date can be mapped to specific entities, other slots must be defined as regular expressions for them to work in the Service Center. Creating these custom slot types is easy by clicking Add Slot Type in the left pane of the slot types page or in the Slots tab in the Utterance tab. In the dialog, select Slot Type and then enter a name for the custom slot. Click Save to create the slot. In the future, a customer will be able to use this custom slot type when requesting offers through the Service Center. This will ensure that the correct slots are matched with the correct offer elements.